Favorite Five: September 2011

“Favorite Five” is written by Anna Luciano, Senior Marketing Coordinator at Nitsch Engineering and Director of the SMPS Boston Communications Committee. Each month, she chooses her five favorite web articles/columns on A/E/C marketing topics. She can be reached through Twitter @annaluciano.

• “Slowpoke: How to be a faster writer,” by Michael Agger, published on Slate:  Writing is the core of what we, as marketers in the A/E/C industry, do every day. With shorter and shorter deadlines in which to complete our work, who couldn’t use some suggestions on how to speed things up?
• “Preventing goof-ups: 10 proofreading tips,” by Daphne Gray-Grant, published on Ragan’s PR Daily: Speaking of writing… in the world of magazine, newspaper, and fiction writing, the roles of writer and proofreader are generally split up. Not so in marketing – we need to produce content and then proofread it. For that reason, I love this list of ways to keep mistakes to a minimum.
• “42 Typographic Resources for Designers,” by Dr. Shelley Gruendler, published on HOW: I am thrilled that typography has, over the last couple years, become a prominent topic in graphic design. This article is a great compilation of resources – from blogs and Twitter users to books and conferences – that are useful and interesting.
• “Who’s Using What Media and When?” by Matt Carmichael, published on AdAgeStat:  I love infographics. And I love social media statistics. So this infographic that breaks down social media usage by generation and time of day is amazing.
• “Facebook Timeline Redefines User Profiles” by Ben Parr, published on Mashable:  In all the uproar about the new Facebook news feed (seriously, why do I need a feed within a feed?), I almost missed out on the announcement about the new Timeline, which will be rolled out over the next month, apparently. It seems very cool, and this article does a great job of succinctly explaining the features. Be sure to click through the slide show! Then, go over here to see “Don Draper Presents Facebook Timeline” – I don’t even watch Mad Men, but this was amazing and hilarious.